Three Ways of Looking at Autism and Older Fathers

_Nature published a study Thursday with some findings about autism and schizophrenia that made an immediate impression. Researchers in Iceland found that the older the father, the more likely it was that a child would have one of those conditions. Their best guess was that as much as thirty per cent of the increase in autism cases could be attributed to the father’s age. The researchers wrote that >

Most notably, the diversity in mutation rate of single nucleotide polymorphisms is dominated by the age of the father at conception of the child… After accounting for random Poisson variation, father’s age is estimated to explain nearly all of the remaining variation in the de novo mutation counts.

Three thoughts on all that:

We tend to react to news about autism culturally, and we deploy it culturally as well. Before anyone had much time to look at the actual science, there were passionate reactions in readers’ comments, on Twitter, and in hallway conversations—frightened, grateful, scornful, outraged that the focus wasn’t on television or modern life (broadly defined), or vaccines. (That last one is easy to explain: it’s because vaccines simply do not cause autism.) We will be hearing more about why fathers now tend to be older, and about dating and delaying and the structure of our lives. Is it too much to ask that we avoid saying this means autism isn’t women’s “fault”? It’s no one’s fault; it wasn’t before this study came out, and it isn’t now.

Cultural issues or no, the science sounds solid. The researchers didn’t just find a paternal-age correlation—that had been noted in earlier studies—they identified a mechanism, involving rates of genetic mutations.

The corollary is that there is clearly a great deal that is now learnable—about the genome, disorders, and the brain. We need to support more science and more studies.

That said, autism remains a mystery; in some ways it may always be one. The same could be said not only of schizophrenia but also of love and marriage, at any age, and of the struggles of parents and children to understand each other. We make our way with decisions and indecisions that we can’t map, forming connections that science will never make sense of.

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